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For X11, I can see the display manager gdm3 (indirectly) launches a process named Xorg, which is the display server.

However when using gnome on wayland, I do not see any children (or grandchildren) of the gdm3 process that could server as a display server. Did I miss something here? What shall be the name of that process?

QnA
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2 Answers2

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Yes, Wayland compositors are user-space processes. There are multiple implementations; the reference implementation is Weston, GNOME uses Mutter, there’s also sway and perhaps others.

The protocol itself is available as libraries, one for the server side, another for the client. Many Wayland servers can also be clients, so you’ll often find them using both libraries.

Stephen Kitt
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The name of that process is gnome-shell.

# find /proc/*/map_files/ -ilname '*libmutter*'
/proc/866/map_files/7f44ef718000-7f44ef71a000
/proc/866/map_files/7f44ef71a000-7f44ef724000
...
# cat /proc/866/comm
gnome-shell
# ls -l /proc/866/exe
lrwxrwxrwx 1 dummy dummy 0 Sep  2 03:50 /proc/866/exe -> /usr/bin/gnome-shell

In gnome, "Wayland" is not a separate program/process/app, but just part of a gnome-shell's (a window/session/application manager combo's) functionality.

  • I don't think that Xorg or Xwayland links to any libmutter-* library. But it's a pointless exercise to try to map gnome modules and application to processes; they've completely blurred the lines (most gnome applications are actually servers, mostly implemented in libraries loaded on demand, and the `gnome-` programs are just stubs which start them via dbus) –  Sep 02 '20 at 01:44
  • My mistake. this is what I wanted to say - on X11 where Xorg was run, there was also a gnome-shell process that loads libmutter-*, same as on wayland. And that fact confuses me - gnome-shell was running on X11 and it loads the same libmutter as in wayland. – QnA Sep 02 '20 at 02:15
  • gnome-shell is the only process that loads libinput*, which should confirm that it is indeed the display server. – QnA Sep 02 '20 at 22:34